Climate change leaves wolverines on slippery slope

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Wolverines, those vociferous, marathon-climbing, fearless relatives of the sea otter may soon face a foe that no amount of bravery can outlast — climate change.

Climate model results from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, show wolverine habitat in the Lower 48 warming significantly from climate change during the second half of the century. The pending warmer climes threaten snow cover that is vital to the wolverine’s survival.

“It’s highly uncertain whether wolverines will continue to survive in the lower 48, given the changes that are likely to take place there,” said NCAR scientist Synte Peacock in a press release, and the lead author of a paper, which appears in Environmental Research Letters.

Wolverine Den (Photo/Wikimedia Commons,Ernst Vikne)

Wolverines dig snow dens for their kits 8 to 10 feet deep, and are specially adapted to run and hunt across the snow. Snow pack also helps preserve carrion that the wolverines rely on for sustenance throughout the winter. While about 15,000 wolverines are estimated to live across Canada and Alaska, only a few dozen are thought to still live in Montana, Wyoming and Washington State, according to the press release.

If the plight of the wolverine is not the kind of thing that gets your hair on end, there’s still reason to care. The study also found that a side effect of the loss of snow melt means big impacts for people as well. The projected lack of snow could reduce the amount of water in Idaho, western Montana and western Wyoming by as much as three or four-fold by the end of the century. Get those water-saving shower heads now.

The study is not meant to bring only doom and gloom. Researcher say this kind of analysis could help us think preventative. “This study is an example of how targeted climate predictions can produce new insights that could help us reduce the impact of future climate change on delicate ecosystems,” said Sarah Ruth, program director for the NSF’s Directorate for Geosciences in a press release.

Wolverine (Photo/U.S. National Park Service)

A critter of unique character — to really understand what makes the wolverine such a remarkable creature, check out Douglas Chadwick’s book, The Wolverine Way. Even if you’re not a wildlife lover, this is an adventurous read that will leave you in awe of what a creature will do to survive.

NCAR Study available here.

Cane toads heart climate change

Cane Toad, AKA Bufo marinus, AKA troublemaker extraordinaire (Photo/ Eli Greenbaum)

Cane toads like it hot, and with climate change poised to raise temps in Australia, this persistent, invasive species could soon be living it up even more.

At least that’s the word coming out of new research from the University of Sydney and presented at the Society for Experimental Biology’s annual conference in Prague.

A lot of what we hear about climate change focuses on habitat loss (cue rising sea levels) or species extinction (sorry red wolf and coral reefs), but here’s another way the pesky, poisonous cane toad can flip the amphibian bird to mankind – warmer climes mean prolific times as far as the toad is concerned.

“The negative effect of high temperature does not operate in cane toads, meaning that toads will do very well with human induced global warming,” said Professor Frank Seebacher from the University of Sydney in a press release.

Many of you reading this are probably familiar with the story of the cane toad, but here’s the quick shake down. In the mid 1930s, Australian biologists, hoping to stem the onslaught of beetles ravaging cane fields, introduced cane toads to Queensland and the Northern Territory. Unfortunately, toads passed on the beetles, instead turning their appetites towards lizards, snakes and other native wildlife. To compound factors, the toads secrete a toxic substance that can do a serious number on just about anything that tries to eat it. So the cane fields now have beetles and bucket loads of poisonous toads. Sigh.

And because of research by Seebacher, we now have a good idea that toads are going to thrive even more as temperatures rise from climate change. Warmer weather makes for stronger, or at least more efficient, heart and lungs in the cane toad, Seebacher found. And if that’s not unsettling enough, the study also states “the cane toad can adapt its physiology in response to a changing environment repeatedly and completely reversibly many times during its lifetime.”

Will nothing temper their proliferation?

Before you totally throw up your hands and say, “Why do I read this if all you’re going to tell me is bad news,” here’s a ray, or sliver, of hope. Maybe, just maybe, this phenomenon will prove true for other toads, ones we actually would like to see stick around. I’ll get back to you when Seebacher conducts that study.

Changing Chesapeake Bay acidity endangers oysters

New research shows that the shell growth of Crassostrea virginica from Chesapeake Bay could be compromised by current levels of acidity in some Bay waters. (Photo/Chris Kelly, UMCES Horn Point Laboratory)

Growing up at the mouth of the Lynnhaven River in Virginia, where the river meets the Chesapeake Bay and the bay meets the ocean, I can’t tell you how many mornings I woke up and looked out my window to see neighbors wading in rubber boots, harvesting oysters from the beds just off our riverbank. For some, like my neighbors, oysters were a way to connect with the land and make a little extra dough. For others it was their livelihood. The act was something that just was. It never occurred to me that the oysters could one day be gone.

That’s why I was especially alarmed to read this new report from the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Sciences. Rising acidity levels in the Chesapeake Bay are making it harder for oysters to grow their shells. I’ve heard the news before that rising ocean acidity from sources such as carbon dioxide can spell disaster for marine wildlife, but this new study shows that acidity is rising faster in the Chesapeake Bay than in the ocean and having a measurable impact on Bay wildlife.

“With oyster populations already at historically low levels, increasingly acidic waters are yet another stressor limiting the recovery of the Bay’s oyster populations,” said marine biologist Dr. Roger Newell of the UMCES Horn Point Laboratory in a press release.

But don’t turn around to blame climate change just yet. The story is a bit more nuanced than that, though the source of the problem still has to do with us. In the saltier areas of the bay, the acidity is going up, leading to thin shell growth that makes oysters more vulnerable to predators, including crabs. But in more freshwater portions of the Bay, acidity is actually going down, said the study, which looked at more than 20 years of historical water quality data from the Bay.

The difference seems to be not atmospheric carbon dioxide, but the base of the food chain. In freshwater areas along the upper Chesapeake, sewage and agricultural runoff cause phytoplankton blooms, which consume carbon dioxide and lower acidity, said the study. Sounds good at this point right? Here’s the catch. As phytoplankton drift through the Bay, they are eaten by animals and other bacteria, releasing the carbon dioxide that the plankton so diligently consumed in the first place. This carbon dioxide lingers in the water, leading to spikes in acidity in the saltier regions of the Bay near the ocean.

“While these variations in acidity may improve conditions for shellfish in some areas, they may also magnify detrimental impacts in others,” said lead author Dr. George Waldbusser of Oregon State University in a press release. “What our study indicates is there may be an important shifting baseline and without better measurements we will fail to fully understand impacts on estuarine biota.”

Beyond the science itself, this study highlights how connected and varied our environment is. It lays out a pathway of human-induced consequences to an ecosystem, and teaches that we need to look beyond one-to-one cause and effect. Erin Voigt, an undergraduate student who worked on the study puts it well. “The complex response of oyster shell formation to temperature, salinity, and acidity highlights the need to understand how the entire ecosystem is changing, not just acidity,” she said.

And that ecosystem includes us.

You can view the article online in the journal Estuaries and Coasts.

Inuit knowledge helps scientists learn something new about Arctic weather

Disclosure: I work as the science writer for CIRES, the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, the institute behind this research.

Inuit forecasters equipped with generations of environmental knowledge are helping scientists understand changes in Arctic weather. (Photo/Shari Gearheard, NSIDC)

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Using skills passed down through generations, Inuit forecasters living in the Canadian Arctic can look to the sky and tell by the way the wind scatters a cloud whether a storm is on the horizon or if it’s safe to go on a hunt.

Thousands of miles away in a lab tucked in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, scientists take data measurements and use the latest computer models to predict weather. They are two practices serving the same purpose that come from disparate worlds.

But in the past twenty years, something has run amok with Inuit forecasting. Old weather signals don’t mean what they used to. The cloud that scatters could signal a storm that comes in an hour, instead of a day.

Now a melding of indigenous environmental knowledge with modern science is helping researchers learn something new about what’s happening to the Arctic climate.

“It’s interesting how the western approach is often trying to understand things without necessarily experiencing them,” said Elizabeth Weatherhead, a research scientist with University of Colorado at Boulder’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences. “With the Inuit, it’s much more of an experiential issue, and I think that fundamental difference brings a completely different emphasis both in defining what the important scientific questions are, and discerning how to address them.”

For years, researchers had heard reports of unpredictable weather coming in from Arctic communities. But their stories didn’t seem to match up with the numbers. By scientific measurement, weather around the world appeared to be growing more persistent with less variation, said Weatherhead. The disparity left scientists scratching their heads.

“I had heard about this problem from other environmental statisticians for a number of years,” said Weatherhead, who also works closely with NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo., and is chief author on a new study on the subject. “But the Inuit used a different language than what we statisticians used, and none of us could really figure out what matched up with their observations.”

That’s where Shari Gearheard, a scientist with CU-Boulder’s National Snow and Ice Data Center, also part of CIRES, comes in. Gearheard lives in Clyde River, Nunavut, Canada, an Inuit community on eastern Baffin Island, and for the past ten years has been working with Inuit hunters and elders to document their knowledge of the environment and environmental change.

Weather carries with it a special importance in Arctic environments, where a reliable forecast can mean the difference between life and death. There are those in the Inuit community who possess the skills to predict the weather, but that’s knowledge that is dying off as both the culture and climate change, said Gearheard.

“The impacts of that are a loss of confidence in those forecasters, and concerns about incorrect forecasts. Forecasters don’t want to send somebody out to go hunting if they’re going to be unsafe and be in poor weather conditions,” said Gearheard.

Gearheard meticulously collects the stories told to her by the Inuit and makes systematic records of indigenous environmental knowledge. Through this, patterns begin to emerge, she said.

Changes experienced during spring, a time of transition for many environmental processes, are of particular importance to the Inuit. During a predictable spring, for example, the Inuit would notice that the top layer of the snow melts during the day and refreezes at night, forming a crust.

“In fact in a lot of places, the season is named after a particular process by the Inuit,” said Gearheard. “In cases like this where the Inuit are not seeing that process anymore, it is an indicator to them that something had changed.”

Gearheard’s records created a resolution of detail for Arctic weather observation that, by bringing the two studies together, gave Weatherhead the information she needed to bridge indigenous knowledge with scientific knowledge. “What was incredibly helpful was Shari’s detailed description of what they were experiencing on what sort of timescales,” said Weatherhead. “That just really allowed us to start focusing in our statistical tests and try to find exactly what matched their observations.”

Statistical analysis of day-to-day temperatures at Baker Lake, Nunavut, showed that in May and June the persistence of temperature had recently declined, matching Inuit reports of greater unpredictability at that season. “People hadn’t previously looked at persistence in this way,” said CIRES fellow Roger Barry, also director of the World Data Center for Glaciology at the National Snow and Ice Data Center and a study co-author along with Gearheard.

What they found was a scientific story more in line with what people were witnessing on the ground. Weather along the Arctic latitudes was behaving more unpredictably than in other parts of the world. “That’s an incredibly important parameter to care about,” said Weatherhead. “The way I try to describe it to some people is if we get an inch of rain out at my house in the month of July, I don’t need to turn on the sprinklers. But if we get an inch of rain on July 1, and no rain after that, my lawn is dead.

Ecosystems have evolved under a certain type of pattern. So if that is changing, that could be just as important as a small increase in temperature or some of the other changes we’re talking about,” Weatherhead said.

The new study helps scientists refine and test climate models, while also providing such models with a new category of information to consider, said Weatherhead. And Gearheard’s work with the Inuit is demonstrating the value of indigenous environmental knowledge to modern climate science.

“When we first started talking about this, indigenous knowledge didn’t have the place it does now in research,” Gearheard said. “It’s growing. People are becoming more familiar with it, more respectful of it.”

Weatherhead and Gearheard are intrigued by the insights incorporating indigenous knowledge has provided climate studies, but they don’t want to stop there, they said. The new study has sparked an interest in the type of environmental knowledge other communities could provide to climate scientists, from ranchers and farmers to indigenous groups. “That’s when exciting stuff happens,” said Gearheard. “When you treat these perspectives as different forms of evidence or knowledge and see where that takes you.”

The study appears this month in the journal Global Environmental Change. The National Science Foundation and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada provided funding for the study.

The Mangrove Forests of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula

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Along the Yucatan Peninsula, in a land of heat and drenching humidity thrives a rare mangrove ecosystem, important for coastal life and home to jaguarundi, hundreds of bird species and, yes, maybe a mosquito or two.  I hope you enjoy this short jaunt into the mangroves, sans the mosquitoes, near Celestun in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. One afternoon doesn’t do a place like this justice, but it is a glimpse into this vulnerable ecosystem that is increasingly under threat from climate change, deforestation, pollution and coral reef degradation.

Family dining right whale style

 

For a month after birth, Southern right whale mothers and their calves rest and nurse. Then, like the pair shown here off Argentina, they start to swim faster and farther as they prepare for a long migration in the South Atlantic to reach their feeding areas. A University of Utah study found mother whales teach their calves where to eat, raising concern about whether the whales can adapt as global warming disrupts feeding grounds. (Photo/John Atkinson, Ocean Alliance)

Mom right whales know best when it comes to mealtime it seems. They lead calves to grub at traditional feeding grounds teaching their offspring generations of knowledge about when and where to find food. In fact whole clans of whales will dine together in the cetacean version of a family-owned dining spot. But this is one family tradition that could lead to starvation for an already vulnerable whale species if climate change causes shifts in food distribution.

Previous research by Vicky Rowntree, research associate professor of biology and a coauthor of the new study at the University of Utah, has already shown the impacts of climate change on right whale populations. When sea temperatures rise, krill disappear and right whales respond by giving birth to fewer offspring. Now these new studies into whale behavior could highlight another problem for the whales when it comes to food.

“A primary concern is, what are whales going to do with global warming, which may change the location and abundance of their prey?” asked Rowntree in a press release. “Can they adapt if they learn from their mother where to feed – or will they die?”

Rowntree and her colleagues collected skin samples from right whales and, using a novel technique in science, combined DNA and isotope analysis to determine whale lineages and where they tend to chow down. They found that related whales congregated in designated areas to feed, and that mothers teach calves in their first year of life where to find food.

Here’s to hoping that right whales will be quick to adapt if the buffet moves elsewhere.

An upside to climate change?

They’re the five “dirty words” of the West — cheatgrass; spotted knapweed; yellow starthistle; tamarisk; and leafy spurge — but the battle against these pervasive troublemakers could receive a boost from an unlikely ally, climate change. Scientists from Princeton University have determined that climate change will very likely cause massive die-offs of these invasive plants across the West, creating unprecedented opportunities to restore millions of acres of infected wilderness to native vegetation.

The findings, released this month in the journal Global Change Biology, will help land managers develop long-term invasive plant recovery projects. The restorative potential comes at a price however, as the model used in the study also predicts that some populations of invasive plants may simply shift their ranges to new areas — yellow starthistle will likely move from its current range in California, Oregon and Washington to a new ranges in California and Nevada for example.

Either way, the study forecasts a new picture of the western landscape, and may help researchers treat or possibly prevent invasive plant infestations. Whether the prognosis is good or bad, this is potentially important news for land managers and residents.

Prehistoric mega-snake reveals ancient climate

Godzilla has nothing on a newly discovered snake species that existed 60 million years ago. The nearly 50 foot-long, one and a half ton snake is the largest ever discovered and would dwarf even today’s biggest anacondas. But its size isn’t the only thing impressing scientists. The remains of this constrictor-like snake contain clues about climate and environment that existed during prehistoric times, a link that could also help researchers understand the effects of climate change on today’s ecosystems.

Jonathan Bloch, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Florida, and Carlos Jaramillo, with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, led the expedition into the previously inaccessible Colombian forest. Based on the link between snake body-size and temperature, Jason Head, a University of Toronto Mississauga paleonotologist, and his team were able to deduce the ancient climate down to the degree Celsius. What they found was an equatorial forest environment that was about 6 degrees warmer than today’s annual temperatures.

“The key thing about this discovery is that we can use it as a launching point to develop very precise climatic reconstructions,” said Head in a press release. “It will help us to look at how ecosystems respond to climate change and specifically, what happens when temperatures increase or decrease.” 

You can read more about this colossal herpetology/paleontology/climate discovery in the Feb. 5, 2009 issue of Nature.

Snoozing through Climate Change

Hitting the snooze button might be a good idea for mammals trying to cope with global warming. Research published this month in The American Naturalist, reveals mammals that hibernate or burrow have a better chance of surviving extinction because of climate change.

Dr. Lee Hsiang Liow of the University of Oslo and his colleagues studied fossil records and found that “sleep-or-hide” mammals lasted longer than other animals as a species. Liow then compared current species trends with animals listed on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature Red list — one detailing the risk status of the world’s biodiversity. What Liow found was that, just like in the fossil record, modern mammals that hibernate or burrow tend to weather climate change better than non-burrowers.

The benefit comes at a price, however, while the critters might be better at coping with climate change, they could be slow to evolve themselves. This leaves “sleep-or-hide” mammals in the proverbial dust as other animals adapt more quickly.

“Sleep-or-hide species survive longer, but in a changing world they run the risk of eventually becoming seriously obsolete,” said Mikael Fortelius of the University of Helsinki, in a press release, “in a way it’s the classic choice between security and progress.”